Every now and again I come across a project I really want to support. Here’s one: Accessing the Future, an SF anthology exploring disability and how it intersects with other factors, edited by Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad.
Disability—and those other factors—is something that concerns me deeply.1
Kathryn and Djibril are raising money at Indiegogo. They need your help. I hope you’ll get behind and push. Meanwhile, here’s Djibril to tell you a bit more about their goals (note: the footnotes are mine).
Disability in SF: support a new anthology
Djibril al-Ayad
Accessing the Future will be an anthology of disability-themed science fiction stories, co-edited by Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad for Futurefire.net Publishing. We want your help to raise the funds to produce it.
Disability has always been one of the axes of privilege in fiction that Futurefire.net cares about. Issues around disability are poorly treated not only in fiction but in most aspects of our society. People with disabilities are still among the most marginalized and financially disadvantaged, and are often smeared as “malingerers” or “spongers.”
In too much science fiction, especially cyberpunk or space opera, we see disabled characters “cured” by the miracle of modern technology (or “escape” their body into the freedom of cyberspace2). We can do better than this. Along with other, intersecting oppressions, disability needs to be addressed in science fiction.
Why address these issues via scifi?
Speculative fiction has freedom to be “unrealistic,” utopian, imagine futures or alternate realities where prejudices and rules of our own world do not necessarily exist. In a secondary world, with invented laws of physics or magic, lines between realistic narrative and parable or “message” are blurred and multivalent. Every literary image has a cacophony of possible readings, conditioned by reader expectations via the shared perceptual filters of our society and genre. When you see a protagonist in mirrorshades talking about meatspace, you know what’s coming. Or you think you do, until the author slips you a queer ball.
These decisions impact the story we want to tell, whether in a subversive postcolonial agenda or a conservative “apolitical” romp. This may mean being overtly political, but the alternative is to be covertly so, and audiences aren’t stupid. If this means we find ourselves preaching to the choir, that’s okay. People who already agree with us, especially when we’re talking about under-represented voices, deserve to read good, politically palatable stories too, to be reminded that they’re not alone, and the good fight is worth fighting.
And hey, having a choir at all in these circumstances is a good problem to have, right?
Support Futurefire.net’s latest anthology of disability-themed SF by pre-ordering or picking up one of the perks at igg.me/at/accessingfuture
1 It’s a rant, yep. I do that sometimes.
2 Turns out I’ve ranted about this, too, in “Writing from the Body.”
Nicola Griffith 
Shall definitely be supporting this and reading some of their other writings on disability in sci-fi.
Think I've mentioned before that I'd like to add such issues to my own writing, but since I've not come across any significant examples in my casual reading/listening pastime I'm finding it tricky to know how best to approach it – even as a disabled person myself.
Thanks for the info!
How to add it? Just make one of characters disabled in some way and then get inside them and imagine the world from their perspective. What are the things they know that others generally don't? What do they have to be aware of all the time that others don't even notice? Etc.
Good luck!
Cool, thanks for the advice! I think I've wanted to avoid using it as a plot device, like films that seem to enjoy putting blind people in peril just for, I dunno, the fun of it I guess. Which isn't very nice.
I might add that layer to a character in my second draft… when I finally get there, of course :)